When you precommit to reading, you will read!
Currently Reading
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb — Richard Rhodes
- How to Think Like a Roman Emperor — Donald Robertson
- A refresher to Marcus Aurelius and stoicism in Roman history.
- The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman
- Limelight of industrial design, he practiced Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Apple before it was a word.
- Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
- Against Rational Choice Theory … when do we make split-second judgements, when do we halt autopilot and reason?
- Elon Musk — Walter Isaacson
- The Everything Store, Jeff Bezos — Brad Stone
Read
- The Origins of Political Order — Francis Fukuyama (26 Jul 2024)
- Brave New World — Aldous Huxley (9 Jul 2024)
- Principles for the Changing World Order — Ray Dalio (7 Jul 2024)
- What We Owe The Future — William MacAskill (3 Jul 2024)
- 21 Lessons for the 21st Century — Yuval Noah Harari (26 Jun 2024)
- Life, the Universe and Everything (Hitchhiker’s 3) — Douglas Adams (19 Jun 2024)
- Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Hitchhiker’s 2) — Douglas Adams (15 Jun 2024)
- Elon Musk — Ashlee Vance (12 Jun 2024)
- The Myth of Sisyphus — Albert Camus (31 May 2024)
- Summary — Life is absurd! We want reasons and meaning, but we get an endlessly chaotic universe — this paradox is the Absurd. If life has no universal meaning, should you kill yourself? No, Camus argues, we must revolt against death and construct our own meaning. We must enjoy the precious little time left to do whatever we please — or, carpe diem. Without universal nature, human rules are not moral punishments to blame but consequences to accept. Sisyphus is not miserable. His pointless struggle to push a rock up a hill is really his happy defiance against God — his very own choice of meaning.
- Review — Camus had 1000 years of Christian political dogma to reject; today, existentialism seems obvious. His insistence on the ‘absurd’ makes him disavow universal meaning, but he also downplays human-constructed meaning, — like markets, technology, societies, family, etc — which is incorrect …
- Public Administration Singapore-Style, Jon Quah (27 May 2024)
- Norweigan Wood — Murakami (26 May 2024)
- CS229 Machine Learning — Andrew Ng & Tengyu Ma (15 May 2024)
- Creativity — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (27 Apr 2024)
- The Outsider — Albert Camus (24 Apr 2024)
- Leonardo Da Vinci — Walter Issacson (20 Apr 2024)
- Creative Selection — Ken Kocienda (12 Apr 2024)
- How did an Apple Principal Engineer design the iPhone?
- Dune 2 — Frank Herbert (10 Apr 2024)
- From Third World to First: The Singapore Story — Lee Kwan Yew’s memoirs (5 Apr 2024)
- The Three-Body Problem — Cixin Liu (1 Apr 2024)
- Foundation 3 — Issac Asimov (9 Jan 2024)
- Foundation 2 — Issac Asimov (7 Jan 2024)
- Review — A gripping sci-fi tale of man’s return from nuclear tech to farming across the Galaxy, and the Foundation against it. Stokes imagination of an intergalactic future, giving satisfying just-so deductions of politics and war that historians despise and engineers adore.
- Reflection — I’m starting to love sci-fi for their stoic ‘View from Above’ — on a cosmic scale, your actions matter little; but that’s no reason to despair! The Universe is majestic and divine, and you’re so lucky to be a speck of that oneness, so maybe forgive that friend who insulted your beliefs. Maybe your cold feet on a foggy San Francisco morning, at a cosmic scale, is simply ok — no reason to curse weather.
- Freakonomics — Steven Levitt (24 Dec)
- Foundation 1 — Issac Asimov (10 Dec)
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy 1 — Douglas Adams (4 Dec)
- Sapiens — Yuval Harari (1 Dec)
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s — Truman Capote (25 Nov)
- Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson (10 Nov)
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — Gabrielle Zevin (9 Nov)
- Zero to One — Peter Thiel (10 Oct)
- Ultralearning — Scott Young (2 Oct)
- When We Cease to Understand the World — Benjamin Labatut (15 Aug)
- Natural Language Processing with Transformers — Lewis Tunstall (2 Aug)
- Dune 1 — Frank Herbert (19 Jul)
- Natural Language Processing with PyTorch — Delip Rao (16 Jul)